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In this essay, I try to reclaim Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers from critics who have tried, since Maus, to read his work solely through the lens of trauma- or affect-based theory. Situating In the Shadow of No Towers intertextually against his earlier Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@*}! and his published interviews, I trace out Spiegelman’s theorization of the ‘grammar’ of comics as a ‘medium of thought’ and explicate how In the Shadow of No Towers thematizes a model of ‘traumatic transmission’ based on a more old-school notion of authorial intentionalism: namely, one that suggests that the text transfers its message directly to the reader’s mind. Thus, rather than the aporetic or alchemical models suggested by trauma and affect theory, Spiegelman embraces what he calls an ‘architectonic’ model that hearkens back to more formalist, traditional modes of literary criticism.